Elephant

Fourteen tracks in about fifty minutes, and the subtractive test finds a first half that holds. Seven Nation Army must open: it states the record’s method, one riff, a kick drum, a voice and an absent bass, and its stance. The Bacharach and David cover is required as the hinge, where the band shows what its method does to a song built for strings. Ball and Biscuit is required as the centre, the long blues the shorter songs abbreviate, and The Hardest Button to Button closes the strong run. The limit is the second half: Hypnotize adds nothing Black Math has not given, and The Air Near My Fingers and Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine restate the riff-song in a lower key.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a record holding to old codes, courtship before the family, constancy and plain craft, against a world of gossip, faithless love and easy means. Seven Nation Army sets a man resolved against the talk that follows him; There’s No Home for You Here makes rejection a chorus; The Hardest Button to Button gives a child who does not fit his family. The sound carries the stance as fully as the words: two players and no bass is itself the claim, and it is heard before a word is sung. What limits the axis is that the claim is an attitude toward the present more than a condition uncovered in it, and the words are compressed and often oblique.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation comes as force rising to exaltation. Seven Nation Army rises by accumulation: the riff alone, then the drums, then the guitar’s surge at each break, a mounting that has made it a crowd’s song. The Bacharach and David cover comes nearest to transport, a whisper that breaks open into a roar and back, the song’s desperation made physical. Ball and Biscuit climbs in its solos, the guitar pitched up into a squall three times. There’s No Home for You Here lifts on massed overdubbed voices, and In the Cold, Cold Night has a small, still beauty. The limits are kind and frequency: the heights are mostly of one kind, and the second half stays level.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Myth is evoked through the blues and through the record’s own figures. Ball and Biscuit summons the seventh son of the blues tradition and offers the singer as a third man, a lineage of figures from Willie Dixon’s songs that the track inhabits as idiom for seven minutes. Seven Nation Army’s marching riff calls up an army without building one. The elephant of the title is memory and weight. The suitor at the door, the child out of place and the fallen sweetheart are old types, kept particular, and the patterns are summoned with conviction and carried by sound. What holds the axis is that none is built: no figure carries the record’s argument as structure, and the archetypes stay atmosphere and idiom.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is the blues of the Delta and of Chicago, Detroit garage rock and the Stooges, the heavy blues rock of the late 1960s, and the band’s own three earlier albums. The turn is against the production of its year: two players, no bass guitar, and a loud, dry room, held across fourteen tracks for a mass audience. That is a stance with a cost in sound, and the record pays it. It is also heavier and fuller than anything the band had made, a bigger room than before. What holds the axis is direction and path: the turn faces backward, the method was the band’s own from the start and had just succeeded on White Blood Cells (2001), and the garage revival was already under way around it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because its knowledge is that restriction makes force. With no bass guitar, the riff of Seven Nation Army, a guitar pitched low, must carry both bottom and melody, and the space left makes every entry of the drums an event. The stop and start of the Bacharach and David cover depends on two players able to drop to nothing at once. The plain drumming leaves the guitar exposed, so each riff stands bare. The sequence is counted here, once: it opens on its emblem, turns at the cover, centres on Ball and Biscuit and ends on a joke. The limit is a second half that is additive, its order open to change without loss.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over twenty-three years, of two kinds. The record is played continuously, its riffs are studied by guitarists, and its method, what two players can do with a guitar and a drum kit, is still discussed as craft; its making has been retold many times. The formal yield is real and repays return: the arrangement of space, the way the absent bass comes to be heard as present, the timing of each entry and each drop to silence. The limits lie in what opens further. The songs give on first hearing most of what they will give, the words are compressed but not layered, and the stance, once grasped, is grasped.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is the rock album of the early 2000s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a two-piece blues band, with no bass guitar and no gloss, could make a mass rock record in the digital years, and it made restriction a public value. Its materials were old, and its reorganisation is of scale more than of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record stands among the central records of the garage revival of its years, with the band’s own White Blood Cells and The Strokes’ Is This It (2001) before it, and the riff of Seven Nation Army passed out of rock into the stadium, where crowds have sung it for two decades.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print on vinyl and CD and in streaming. Presence is continuous and, through one song, as wide as any rock recording of its decade: Seven Nation Army is played at sporting events and sung by crowds who may not know its source. That breadth belongs to a song more than to the album, which is heard far less than its first track, and popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is deliberately old, and two players in a dry room date less than the production of their year.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The making is load-bearing. Jack White’s riffs are exact and economical, the guitar tone is controlled at the edge of breakup, and the voice runs from a yelp to the hush of the Bacharach cover. The production keeps a loud, dry room clear, and the overdubbed choir of There’s No Home for You Here is arranged with care. The spaces are made as exactly as the sounds: each stop is placed, and each return lands. The limits fall on a share of the record. Meg White’s drumming serves the songs by design and commands little, its plainness a choice and also a ceiling; Ball and Biscuit’s solos repeat themselves; and the second half’s songs are thinner in writing and arrangement.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: plain means and an old code, held against a present that has given up both. The two most distant elements obey it. I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself, a song made for an orchestra and a soul singer, is played by two people at full volume; It’s True That We Love One Another is a comic music-hall trio with acoustic guitar. Both are old forms kept alive by plain means, and the code of constancy, courtship and craft runs through both. In the Cold, Cold Night, sung by Meg White, small and still, is the quietest instance of the same restriction. The range of form is wide; the range of sound is narrower, and the comic coda strains the law in tone.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Love and courtship are held in several kinds: the suitor, the rejected, the betrayed, the constant. The family enters twice, a mother to be won in I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother’s Heart and a child out of place in The Hardest Button to Button. Fame and the talk around it are present in Seven Nation Army; craft and tradition run through the whole as a value; resilience is preached in Little Acorns through a borrowed voice. Labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent. What holds the figure lowest is that the orders lie close together, love and its codes seen by one persona.

Score: 7.2 / 10